


No Stop Signs or Speed Limit

by deirdre_c



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-04
Updated: 2011-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-17 14:41:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deirdre_c/pseuds/deirdre_c
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone's gotta save Dean from hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Stop Signs or Speed Limit

Something’s coming.

Dean can’t see it. His eyes are swelled partially shut, old blood caked and stiff on his lashes. He can’t turn to look anyway, trussed up by his wrists, hands long since gone numb.

But Dean can hear it. He’d recognize the sound of that motor anywhere, even over the roar of flames and echoing shrieks of his fellow denizens of Hell.

Sam’s finally come for him.

But when he manages to raise his head—pain lancing through his shoulders and down his spine—and avidly tracks the Impala’s approach, he realizes that Sam’s not in the driver’s seat.

No one is.

He watches the car swerve around pools of bubbling lava, dodge billowing shafts of fire that blister her sleek paint, headlights slicing two clean, bright beams through the red murk. Her steering wheel swivels, untouched.

Dean drops chin to chest, sure he’s hallucinating. Well, at least it’s a pleasant change from the perpetual cycle of boredom, thirst, torture, and boredom.

Then he hears the crunch of metal and he winces as if being flayed… again. He tilts his chin up enough to see the Impala once more reverse and then charge the pillar he’s suspended from, ramming it again and again with her now-crumpled front bumper. The pillar shudders, crumbling at the base, and begins to fall, carrying Dean helplessly down along with it. She’s gauged it nicely, though, and he’s not crushed by the massive column of plummeting rock or concrete or whatever the hell that Hell is carved out of.

Through the settling dust, a thick stream of windshield wiper fluid arcs through the air—the bluest thing Dean’s ever seen—and hisses as it sprays the broiling hot floor all around him. Then one door opens, hooks around the bolt that secures Dean’s shackles to the fallen pillar, and levers it out like a bottle opener popping the cap off a Coors.

Dean could really go for a Coors right about now.

She revs her engine gently, encouragingly, and he forces himself to make the excruciating crawl over the still-steaming patch of ground, finally setting one hand, throbbing with pins-and-needles, on the edge of the door frame, the other on the steering wheel at six o’clock. He hefts himself up onto the familiar vinyl, dragging the chains along behind, and presses his face to the cool of the headrest.

The seat back lowers, the door slams, the tires squeal, and they speed off into the darkness.

Dean comes to when they jolt to a halt in front of a cabin under bare-branched trees. He squints against the sunlight and sees Sam at the top of the front steps, some incomprehensible language rolling off his tongue as he reads incantations from a massive old book gripped tight in both hands. He drops it as he leaps toward them, and the moment the book hits the ground the Impala’s motor sputters and goes silent.

Sam yanks the door open and runs fierce hands over every inch of Dean’s unmarked and unshackled body.

“Sammy?” His voice creaks like a rusty hinge.

Sam’s grinning and crying at the same time and he looks like shit, a good twenty pounds lighter than Dean remembers, sallow and hollow-eyed.

“Sorry I didn’t come to get you myself. They wouldn’t let me in.” Sam takes one hand off of him long enough to pet the dashboard fondly. “I had to send a friend.”


End file.
